Today we added a new utility to the SA Application Manager WIKI which allows to model tasks as SA resources. This utility can be used together with the Agentless Adapter of the SA Application Manager as well as for the instrumentation of resources in SA for Multiplatforms.

What are task resources?

With System Automation it is possible to
manage the availability of all resources in a datacenter. System Automation
ensures the availability 24x7 by constantly monitoring the availability of defined
resources and automatically reacts on unplanned outages. Furthermore System
Automation helps in planned start/stop and relocation scenarios for all the
defined resources. Tasks in the context of System Automation are simple, reoccurring actions
that an operator has to perform on a cluster like backups, installing updates
or changing configurations of some service. Until now, these actions could hardly
be represented in a System Automation policy without writing a suitable wrapper
around these commands.

With the new concept of „Task Resources“ System Automation
enables you to manage these routine maintenance jobs together with the
management of high available, resilient services. With System Automation
Application Manager it is now possible to:

Ensure Resiliency of services: The
main purpose of high availability clustering is to ensure the availability of
components that provide continuous service to their consumers. This has been
the main function so far provided by System Automation. Typical examples are daemon processes, windows services or in other words: long running processes that have to stay available and running.Do re-occuring daily tasks: Tasks that have to be executed on a regular base to maintain a proper operational state for those services. Typically these are shell scripts - examples are: create backups, reconfigure setups, apply fixes, delete logs, etc.

The new utility named “eeztask” is now available to provide
simple means to express these task-like actions (e.g. create copies of log
files) as standard automation resources and thus integrate them in any System
Automation policy.

Find the utility and a detailed description in our WIKI in the Best Practices Section of the SA Application Manager - following this link: